If you are serving in a small church, it may seem like you should have more than enough time for everything. If you don’t think that, I am positive a number of people around you do.

As I serve at Seven Mile Road, in addition to serving as Executive Pastor, I also lead our bands, several of our leadership development tracks, and I support our preaching team. There are always a number of projects I need to be working on at a particular moment.

Many would think that this might not be the case in a church of our size, but it is true. Here's why:

You have to be a generalist. Smaller churches may have a smaller number of tasks and smaller scale, but they also have less workers and people working out of their areas of expertise. Not only do you not have the volume of people to get involved in the work, a task that may take an expert in the field a few minutes can take a non-specialist hours. Non-accountants, remember when you first learned how to make a Pivot Table?

You aren’t only working for this Sunday. You could spend all of your effort and energy getting through this Sunday, but that doesn’t get you where you need to be. If you are leading this church, you are leading it towards its future. There’s always work to be done there.

You simply don’t have time for everything that needs to get done today, but you can’t afford to drown in the now. Your job is to advance the mission now and later.

So success is not in this meeting or that song, but in surfacing and equipping godly and skillful leaders for now and later. Your mission needs it. They need it. And you need it. You don't have enough time not to.